says Barbara Richardson, Amtraks marketing and sales vice-president. You know youre doing something right when your advertising can generate revenue, she said. The Acela campaign began in September 2003. Graphic artist Michael Schwab is best known for his work for Apple, Coke, and Nike.

LaHood dismisses IllinoisAmtrak high-speed service

U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood (R) said on July 15 he does not favor high-speed rail for Illinois.

I think its a bad idea, mainly because we dont have the money to fund the routes that currently serve Illinois, LaHood said at the Statehouse.

Amtrak President David Gunn said earlier this week in Chicago that upgrading the Chicago-St. Louis corridor for faster passenger trains is a top priority for Amtrak. Planners want trains to be able to go 110 mph in the corridor, while the current top speed is 79 mph  but it would take nearly $200 million for the next phase of track and equipment upgrades.

LaHood said he considers Amtrak the lifeblood transportation for small communities, and he knows many college students from Chicagos suburbs use trains to travel to school, Copley News Service reported via The Lincoln Courier.

On the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is fabulous, LaHood added, and after 9-11, it became the transportation of choice for a lot of people because they felt it was safer than flying.

I think if were going to have a pot of money where we subsidize airlines and we subsidize the funding of highways, that we certainly ought to continue to subsidize Amtrak, LaHood said.

He said, I dont think we can afford at this point, with the kind of deficits were running, to be talking about high-speed rail.

While funding is his main concern, he said, People in rural Illinois are not for high-speed rail... They do not want a train traveling 120, 125, 150 miles per hour through the rural areas, and I support them on that.

After saying that they would operate the Sunset Limited, Train No. 1 of July 11 to the bitter endpoint of Los Angeles, despite bridge outages, freight delays, hell, high water and Union Pacific, Amtrak has given up. On arrival at El Paso, the passengers and onboard services crew detrained and were provided other transportation.

The equipment was to deadhead to Los Angeles, hopefully to arrive last Friday, to turn to train No. 2 for July 16

As of 1:15 a.m. on July 15, the train was 34 hours and 5 minutes late.

The empty train arrived in L.A. 49 hours, 25 minutes late.

In June, the four daily trains in the Cascades service between Portland and Eugene were on time only 25 percent of the time, according to the Rail Division of the Oregon DOT, which contracts with Amtrak to provide the trains.

The long-distance Coast Starlight had an on-time record in June of 8.3 percent, said Jonathan Hutchison, the passenger rail coordinator at ODOT.

Amtrak trains operate on tracks owned by other railroads, in this case the Union Pacific, and the passenger trains have been severely hampered by what Hutchison called four primary challenges faced by the UP.

He listed them as an increase in freight business, being short-staffed because of an unanticipated number of retirements, a shortage of locomotives, and a track structure in Oregon thats not well equipped to handle the number of trains.

Oregon is spending $15 million to make track improvements this year and next.

Despite the poor on-time record, the four Cascades trains serving Albany had a 6.7 percent increase in ridership in May, compared to the same month last year, Hutchison reported.

Another official in the Rail Division, Robert Melbo of Albany, said earlier that UP was working to deal with its problems.

Things do appear to be better now in the Willamette Valley than they were earlier this year, and timeliness of the state-supported Eugene-Portland passenger trains is likewise improving, Melbo wrote in an e-mail on June 28.

The Charlotte Area Transit System in Charlotte, N.C., recently returned trolley service to the tracks for the first time in more than 65 years. The service covers about 2.1 miles with 10 stations, running from Historic South End to Center City Charlotte.

More than 8,300 riders hopped aboard the trolley during its first week of operation after Charlotte Mayor Patrick McCrory joined representatives of CATS, Charlotte Trolley Inc., Charlotte Center City Partners, and Historic South End to throw the official switch restoring service.

CATS is operating the initial trolley service with Car 85  the only remaining electric trolley car from Charlottes former service, which operated until 1938. Three replicas of the historic car design will arrive this summer to provide expanded and more frequent service along the trolley line.

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